Elvis and Eminem Rights Holders Sue Suno Over AI Voice Cloning and Copyright Infringement

Two separate lawsuits, filed on November 6 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, are testing the legal boundaries of a virtually uncharted territory: how far does the right to train an artificial intelligence model on copyrighted works extend, and at what point do a songwriter's copyrights and a performer's right of publicity come into play against a generative platform? Both actions — one representing the rights holders of Elvis Presley and the other Eight Mile Style, the publishing company that controls 269 Eminem compositions — go beyond the already well-known cases filed by major record labels, Universal, Sony and Warner, who have been suing Suno since June 2024 for training their models on protected recordings.

What distinguishes these lawsuits from the initial wave of industry cases is that they touch on two distinct legal frontiers. The Elvis Presley Enterprises action, brought by Authentic Brands Group, Raleigh Music Publishing and other rights holders, includes a claim that does not appear in the labels' lawsuits: a violation of Tennessee's ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security), passed in 2024. This specific legislation prevents AI companies from cloning a performer's voice without consent, and the plaintiffs argue that Suno enables users to generate tracks that imitate Presley's distinctive vocal timbre simply by entering his name into the "Create" field. The 51-page complaint cites examples of outputs generated by the platform that, according to the plaintiffs, reproduce recognizable and distinctive aspects of the King of Rock and Roll's voice.

The Eight Mile Style action, by contrast, focuses purely on musical composition copyright. The publisher is seeking $150,000 per each of the 269 compositions it controls — totaling $40.35 million, plus an additional $672,000 for alleged removal of embedded copyright information from the works. The complaint identifies specific tracks including "Lose Yourself," "Stan" and "The Real Slim Shady," and presents as evidence a Suno-generated song titled "Slim shady x Rosefalls," which uses an AI-generated image of Eminem as cover art and vocals clearly derived from Eminem's actual voice, according to the filing.

What makes the Eight Mile Style case particularly interesting from a technical standpoint is the allegation that Suno's filters — which prohibit prompts with specific artist names — are easily bypassed. According to the complaint, instead of typing "Eminem," a user can employ a string of terms such as "aggressive rap, rapid-fire flow, dark humor, male rapper, horrorcore" to achieve an equivalent result. This evasion technique, if proven in production, could be replicated for hundreds of other artists in Suno's training data.

Suno responded to the allegations with a statement to Billboard: "Suno exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone's name or likeness." The company says it prohibits unauthorized use of artist works, blocks prompts with specific names, and works with third-party providers to filter audio files and lyrics. But this defense raises a central question of the debate: if Suno trained its models on millions of protected recordings — as it has already admitted in the Universal and Sony label lawsuits — can it be held legally responsible when its users generate outputs that resemble those works?

The attorneys representing the plaintiffs in both cases issued a joint statement that goes to the heart of the philosophical dispute: actions like Suno's make human creativity obsolete, coldly replicating without a license in seconds what takes years to learn, struggle with, maintain, and endlessly attempt to make better and perfect. This sentence encapsulates the tension between two economic models that are colliding in the music industry: the traditional licensing model, in which each use of a composition requires prior authorization, versus the generative AI model, in which training is considered fair use by the technology side.

The timing of these actions is not accidental. They come months after Warner Music Group closed a licensing deal with Suno, ending its lawsuit and entering the same category as a commercial partner. BMG also signed a similar agreement. But Universal Music Group and Sony Music remain in the Boston courtroom, where in September 2026 they filed a second action alleging that Suno's v6 models contained 60,202 protected recordings. The labels' lawyers argue in their complaints that every machine-generated track delivered to a streaming service competes for discovery, for finite listener attention, and for a share of the fixed royalty pools that compensate legitimate artists and rights holders.

The scale of the problem the Elvis and Eminem rights holders are trying to quantify is enormous. According to industry reports, more than half of the new tracks uploaded daily to Spotify and Apple Music are now AI-generated, totaling roughly 90,000 tracks per day — most of them created by tools like Suno. If a significant fraction of these tracks resembles protected compositions or the voice of specific artists, the potential damage is not only financial but structural: the music industry's remuneration model, built over decades on the basis of exclusive copyright, may be eroded at a scale that no individual licensing mechanism could ever hope to track.

After years of watching their voices and works reproduced at scale without authorization or compensation, historical artists like Presley and Mathers are testing whether the American judicial system can keep pace with the velocity of technological change — or whether the outcome will, once again, be the transfer of the dispute from the courtroom to the negotiating table, where economic power decides who stays and who leaves.

Sources: Variety, Billboard, AllHipHop, Engadget

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